Facebook removed a gospel group's music video. Here's why they made a mistake

Herb Scribner, Deseret News

Saturday

Jul 7, 2018 at 2:22 AM

Facebook continued its crackdown on suspected political advertising last month when it removed a gospel music group's video.

Facebook continued its crackdown on suspected political advertising last month when it removed a gospel music group's video, according to The New York Times.

Zion's Joy, a vocal group from Indianapolis, had its video removed last month from the social network.

The video shows clips of anguish and protests, including scenes from the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, with the song “What Would Heaven Look Like” playing behind.

The aim of the video was to help people, the group said.

“We want to touch people's hearts and let people know that we can do better than the world is doing right now,” Robert W. Stevenson, the group's founder, told The New York Times.

The video was made about a week before the group decided to promote it on Facebook, which then identified the video as “political content” and blocked it.

A Facebook spokeswoman acknowledged in a statement the new ad policy is “new, broad and exists to prevent election interference, so we're asking people with content that falls under those rules to simply get authorized and show who paid for the ad in order for it to run.”

The spokeswoman said the social media network made an error in deleting the entire post.

“As soon as we identified what happened, we restored the post since it does not violate our Community Standards and apologized to Zion's Joy,” the statement said, according to The New York Times.

The video is still available on YouTube.

Facebook has updated its ad policy as a way to help fight against misinformation and fake news spreading through its social media platform. As the Deseret News reported, Facebook said last month it had already disabled 1.3 billion fake accounts over the past six months.

But it hasn't worked out well for all. Facebook was reportedly aware of a Mexican fake news campaign that existed on its website for months ahead of the recent Mexican presidential election, according to BuzzFeed News.

In fact, BuzzFeed reported that Facebook held off from deleting “a major source of fake news in Mexico” until after the Atlantic Council, which has partnered with Facebook, had a chance to review the case.

Facebook said last month about 3 to 4 percent of its accounts are fake, which means between 66 to 88 million accounts post fake content on their pages.